Abstract

This thesis deals with issues of gender, power, and history in Koriak women's lives in northern Kamchatka. The Koriak represent one of the indigenous populations of Russia's north. They migrate with the reindeer over vast, rugged tundra territory, and live by the products the animals and the land yield. This cultural order has increasingly been threatened by encroachments of first the Soviet, and now the Russian, state. Today, the Koriak are marginalized within the powerful model of the nation state, and their lives are marked by dissolution and despair.

I conducted my research in two villages, Tymlat and Ossora, situated at the northeastern shore of the Kamchatka peninsula. In particular I worked with Koriak women whose various discourses of love, erotics, and desire I examine in this thesis. I adopt a wider framework of history, state power, and marginalization to analyze their practices of femininity and sexuality. In order to exemplify the Koriak experience of everyday life in northern Kamchatka I draw on women's narratives to elucidate various strategies of gender and cultural positionings in the life-world of Tymlat and Ossora. Moreover, I explore Koriak descriptions of Soviet history as a critical commentary on Soviet and Russian descriptions of historical processes in northern Kamchatka.